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Monday, 15 December 2008

I’m delighted to be able to give you two very exciting pieces of news.

First, a much-delayed bumper summer issue of ‘The Free Radical' magazine is just days away from hitting the inside of subscribers’ letterboxes – in fact, the finishing touches are being put to this issue as we speak! Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out on your Christmas treat: all the reading you need to make sense of today’s current events.

Second, in anticipation of National/ACT’s select committee inquiry into climate change, we have a world exclusive Open Letter to John Key on Climate Change sent by the world’s leading climate ‘skeptic,’ Christopher Monckton – or Viscount Monckton of Brenchley as he’s known to his friends.

This is pure gold; the world’s leading climate ‘skeptic’ explains to NZ’s new Prime Minister that the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, and is now thoroughly and scientifically discredited.

To give you just a taste, here’s some leading excerpts. As you can see, it’s a thorough exposition:

I applaud the stated intention of both Act and National to re-examine both the fatally flawed emissions-trading plans of the previous government and the fundamentals of the science of “global warming”, but I remain concerned at your continuing policy goal – pointlessly to halve your country’s economic output.

Is climate change literally a “hot” topic? As you ponder that question, Sir, consider that the recorded temperature in the Christchurch of 2008 is no warmer than the Christchurch of 1910 – as you can establish for yourself by checking the record. Clearly, there are more facts to bring to bear than either your colleagues or your advisers have told you hitherto.

The facts which I shall give you in this letter are taken not from my own imagination, nor from the obscurantist reports of the UN’s climate panel, nor from any lobby group, but from the real-world, observed data and the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Today’s temperature, in the perspective of the long recent history of our planet, is unusually low…

At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today.

A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century; that the “global warming” that had been observed over the previous 300 years had ended; that global cooling would soon become the norm; and that anthropogenic effects on the climate were negligible.

From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 °F per century. In 1998, “global warming” stopped, and it has not resumed since. Indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 °F per decade. Very few news media have given any prominence to this long and pronounced downturn in the temperature trend. The January-January fall in global mean surface temperatures between 2007 and 2008 was the steepest since global-temperature records were first compiled in 1880.

Since the world is not warming at the rate projected by the UN’s climate panel (the IPCC), it follows that the urgency relentlessly suggested by that panel is by no means as great as the UN’s reports would have us believe. Some 20 years ago, the IPCC told us we had ten years to avert climate disaster. Today, the IPCC’s chairman says exactly the same.

Despite rapidly-rising carbon dioxide concentrations, there has been no new record year for global temperature in the ten years since 1998; and, in the United States, there has been no new record year for national temperature since 1934.

Greenhouse gases keep the world warm enough for plant and animal life to thrive. Without them, the Earth would be an ice-planet all of the time rather than some of the time… Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago: for the atmosphere is large and we are small.

Sir, you have proposed a “target of cutting New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2050.” Yet your party is supposedly committed to free enterprise, and you have said you are “ambitious for New Zealand”. Do you not think that a far greater degree of scientific certainty as to the effects of minuscule increases in carbon dioxide concentration on temperature would be advisable before you inflict strategic damage on any such scale upon your own country’s economy from within?

A recent survey of 539 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since January 2004 and selected at random using the search term “global climate change” reveals that not a single paper provides any evidence whatsoever that “human induced climate change is real” or that “it’s threatening the planet.” The fictitious notion of imminent, catastrophic climate change is almost wholly absent in the scientific literature… Since the UN’s estimates are indeed exaggerations, and are known to be so, the only potentially-“credible” basis for alarmism falls away.

Using computer models to predict the climate cannot ever be effective or accurate: for the climate, in the formal, mathematical sense, is chaotic… Long-run climate prediction is impossible unless we can know the initial state of the millions of variables that define the climate object, and know that state to a degree of precision that is and will always be in practice unattainable. It is the common characteristic of any chaotic object, such as the climate, that the slightest perturbation, however minuscule, in the initial value of even one of that object’s variables can induce substantial and unpredictable “phase transitions” – sudden changes of state – in the future evolution of the object. The climate is defined not by one or two variables but by millions.

The UN [IPCC, 2001], accepts that the climate is “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object”, and, consequently, that “long-term prediction of climate states is impossible.” Yet it then attempts the impossible by making predictions of climate sensitivity that are already being proven exaggerated by the failure of temperatures to rise as the computer models had predicted (or, recently, at all).

All of the climate models relied upon by the UN predict that the distinguishing characteristic or “fingerprint” of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing is that in the tropical mid-troposphere, about 6 miles up, temperature over the decades should rise at two or even three times the rate of increase observed at the tropical surface. However (and it is crucial that you should understand this), the computer-predicted “hot-spot” over the tropics that is the supposed fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming, entirely distinct from that of any other source of warming, has not been observed in any of the tropospheric temperature datasets. Thirty years of satellite data do not show the “hot-spot” either. It is not there.

You also need to know that the values for climate sensitivity in the computer models – in short, the central estimates of how much the world’s temperature will increase in response to a given rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – are not outputs from the models, but inputs to them. The computers are being told to assume high climate sensitivity, so a high climate sensitivity is what they find.

Let me summarize the irremediably shaky basis for the UN’s alarmist case. It is not based on physical theory. In several fundamental respects, it is at odds with theory… Nor is the UN’s case based on real-world observation: and, as we have seen, its principal predictions and conclusions are grievously at odds with real-world observation… The UN’s entire case is based on computer modeling, in which – astonishingly – the models are told at the outset the values for the very quantity (temperature response to increased carbon dioxide concentration) that we are told they are going to calculate.

From late 2001 on, the oceans and the atmosphere simultaneously cooled. The UN dealt with the problem by ignoring it, as did many of the news media, who simply failed to report that the world has been cooling for seven years.

Sea level has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. It is 400 feet higher now than it was then. The rate of increase has averaged 4 feet per century. Yet in the 20th century .. sea level rose by little more than 7 inches… There is no scientific basis, therefore, for saying that any anthropogenic warming that may have occurred over the past 50 years has had any appreciable effect on sea level.

The UN imagines that most sea-level rise will come not from the melting glaciers about which the media so frequently fantasize, but from thermosteric expansion – sea water swelling as it warms. However, thermosteric expansion can only occur if the body of water in question is getting warmer. The oceans are not getting warmer (except in certain regions, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, where there is evidence of undersea volcanic activity).

There is no reason to suppose that sea level will rise any faster in the 21st century than it did in the 20th – i.e., by about 8 inches… There is not and has never been any scientific basis for the exaggerated projections by a certain politician that sea level might imminently rise by as much as 20 feet. That politician, in the year in which he circulated a movie containing that projection, bought a $4 million condominium just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco… In a recent case in the High Court in London the judge said of this politician that “the Armageddon scenario that he predicts is not based on any scientific view.”

Given that glacial recession began long before humankind could have had any appreciable effect on global temperature, and given that the rate of recession has remained uniform, on what basis can it be said that it is anthropogenic “global warming” that is causing the glaciers to recede?

Finally, only a tiny proportion of the future sea-level rise imagined by the UN’s climate panel is attributed by it to melting glaciers.

You will recall that in the 1940s the Arctic was warmer than it is today.

Both the summer and the winter extent of the sea ice surrounding Antarctica was greater in 2007/8 than at any time since the satellite record began 30 years ago.

But the most telling evidence of all is that the mean thickness of the Greenland ice sheet increased by 2 inches per year – a total of 1 ft 8 in – during the decade 1993-2003. Once again, there is no cause for alarm.

Tim Flannery, an environmentalist campaigner, “predicted” last June that Sydney’s dams would run dry. He said this was “the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now." He made his prediction just days before a deluge that made that month the wettest June since 1964.

Over a sufficient timescale of decades, then, a warmer climate will entail not a drier atmosphere but a moister one. Sure enough, some of the world’s driest regions – such as the southern Sahara – have experienced more, not less, precipitation over the period of the satellite record.

As to suggestions that the world is likely to see reduced water supplies, you are yet again seeing “global warming” blamed for a problem that has nothing to do with warmer weather. As the human population expands, its demands on water supplies increase. That, and not “global warming”, is why many parts of the world do not have regular supplies of drinking water.

There is no longer any credible, scientific basis for the implicit conclusion that “a higher incidence of extreme-weather events” has occurred because of anthropogenic “global warming.”

A certain Tennessean tobacco-planter and politician, in his notoriously-inaccurate sci-fi comedy horror movie about the imagined “climate crisis”, cited a scientific paper that, he said, revealed that “global warming” was already killing polar bears. However, the paper concerned, had actually said that just four polar bears had died in the Beaufort Sea, not because “global warming” had made sea-ice scarce, but because of unusually strong winds and high sea states in a severe Arctic storm. The politician had simply chosen to misstate the principal conclusion of the paper on the cause of the polar bears’ death, because the truth did not fit the great lie.

Intrigued by this evidence that there is more ice, not less, in the Beaufort Sea, I decided additionally to check the total extent of sea ice in the Arctic on 30 November 1979 and on 30 November 2008. I found that there was almost as much sea ice on St. Andrew’s day this year as there was in the first year of the satellite record… I also decided to check whether the global sea-ice extent had declined in response to the supposed “global warming” of the past 30 years. It had not. There has been no trend – no trend at all – throughout the period of satellite observations.

The key characteristic of a species at risk is, of course, declining population. However, the population of polar bears is not plummeting. Instead, there are five times as many polar bears in the Arctic today than there were in the 1940s. As you may think, Sir, that is hardly the profile of a species facing imminent extinction as its habitat shrinks away.

I have presented evidence, drawn directly from the raw data and from the peer-reviewed, scientific literature, to establish that, at the very least, there is reasonable doubt about whether destroying the Western economies on the scale now proposed ... would make any difference whatever to the climate, even if there were a “climate crisis” ...

And finally,

Sir, every one of the reasons advanced by the IPCC and its faithful adherents for alarm and consequent panic action has been demonstrated to be hollow and without any scientific foundation or merit. Yet, if your proposal to close down half of the economy of New Zealand is to be justifiable, then the false scientific and policy propositions that you apparently support must be shown to be true.

I did say it was thorough – and this is just the excerpts!

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Now it’s the last full week before Christmas, it’s time for my first Christmas post of 2008. How do you answer this question:

Is Christmas too commercial?

It’s clearly not as “commercial” this year as morons like Kevin Rudd would like to make it (he’s just printed and distributed 8.7 billion dollars of shopping subsidies to make his economic theorists happy) and it’s obviously not as commercial this year as it has been when real money was less tight, but how often do we hear that whinge that “Christmas is too commercial!”

And it’s just nonsense anyway, says philosopher Leonard Peikoff, because that complaint misses the very point of Christmas, the most benevolent and frankly commercial holiday in the catalogue.

At Christmas we don't say "sacrifice and repent," we say enjoy yourself and thrive! Getting together with workmates, friends and loved ones, celebrating the year with gusto; giving gifts pleasure to people you value, whose friendship you want to enjoy. Boats full of happy people cruise the harbour; laughing diners fill restaurants; shops overflow (well,most years) with people buying gifts to make people happy who make them happy. What's not to like about Christmas being commercial?

Christmas [says Perikoff] is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as "materialistic"; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously... The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.... All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by [Western] culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness... Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

And so say all of us.

Well, most of us. Some of you will be saying there’s some other “reason for the season.” Well, historians know the "reason for the season," and what they know is it's not because of the Nativity. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently knows the truth, conceding last year that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men - the whole Nativity thing -- is all just "a legend." [Hat tip James Valliant].

This Christmas, think about giving the gift of truth. And have a happy, and commercial, Christmas.

Since this was the same Sunday Star Times, and the same so-called reporters, that not so long ago published claims that Tariana Turia was being bugged by the SIS – a claim investigated and subsequently demolished by Justice Paul Neazor, who called it "a work of fiction" – you’ll forgive me if I don’t lend any credence to the report without better evidence than Nicky Hager and Anthony Hubbard provide.

But let’s assume for argument’s sake that the claim is true. So what? The groups are said to include the likes of Safe Animals from Exploitation (SAFE), Peace Action Wellington, GE-free groups, and Save Happy Valley. All of these are law-breakers – as is their ‘mother ship’ Greenpeace, who if you’ll remember were supporters of the likes of the Sea Shepherd, which spends time in freezing Antarctic waters trying to sink Japanese whaling ships with all the lives on board.

These people are not part of a knitting circle.

SAFE have a history of breaking and entering, and destroying people’s property. It was GE-free groups who broke into Lincoln University a few years back and destroyed experiments worth millions (and, incidentally, risked spreading the GE virus against which they were protesting). And Save Happy Valley and Peace Action Wellington are nothing like as benevolent as they sound: members of both these groups have been arrested and investigated in the past for wilful damage, and both were included in those arrested last year as part of the Te Qaeda/Urewera 17 operations.

So even if the claim was proven true, if these groups are being investigated is simply means the police are doing their job.

Left wing activists targeted by the police in an ongoing and controversial domestic intelligence operation have reported that they are ‘greatly relieved’ that information about their massive conspiracy to defraud the Social Welfare Department was not passed on to police by paid informer Rob Gilchrist. ‘We would have been totally busted,’ admitted Aro Valley resident Jules Fletcher, a 43 year old sickness beneficiary and tactical intelligence officer of the two man revolutionary cell ‘Tino-rangatiratanga People’s Global Jihad for Social and Environmental Justice Now!’.

I don’t know about you, but I keep hearing this all the time. “What makes it especially revolting,” says Harry Binswanger, longtime friend of Rand (who died in 1982), “is that the real destroyer of the economy is Greenspan, through his inflation-generating last years at the Fed.”

Commentators from Gareth Morgan to Harry Binswanger to Roger Kerr to George Reisman to the contributors at the Mises Institute have pointed this out, but for the most part haven’t been heard. They’ve cogently, responsibly and thoroughly destroyed the myth of free-market failure, pointing out the role and responsibility of Greenspan and his central bankers for the present crash (whose seeds were set in Greenspan’s massive credit expansion from 2001 to 2004), and for all the earlier crashes over which they presided. The priority of Alan Greenspan’s Fed in particular, notes Morgan, has become to keep economic growth going by the continual expansion of credit. “So much so that the periodic creative destruction that markets naturally undertake to prevent excesses, was no longer considered necessary. Oh dear.”

But for the most part, the mainstream media isn’t really listening. The real story doesn't fit their pro-big-government playbook.

This is not a failure of free markets, this is not a failure of capitalism, but this is a failure of the exact opposite. It's a failure of the regulatory state. It's a failure of all the government policies of the last eight years. Actually, the last 95 years.

Why do you say the last 95 years? I believe that the No. 1 cause of the current crisis is Federal Reserve policy. [The Federal Reserve was created in 1913.] The Federal Reserve, by necessity, creates economic problems; no matter how good a Federal Reserve chairman is, he's going to create cycles of booms and busts.

And Britain’s Telegraph carries this blog from Ayn Rand Institute’s Alex Epstein: “What capitalists need to understand,” penned in response to Iain Martin's observation in the Telegraph that "A culture war has been launched against free markets and so far the hostilities have been astonishingly one-sided." This “unfortunately applies just as much to America as to Britain,” says Epstein (as it does here).

Good question – and he has the answer. Find out what capitalists need to understand to make them more vocal in defence of their values. What they need to know above all is this:

Today's crisis illustrates the evils of government intervention in the economy and vindicates supporters of laissez-faire capitalism… Today's events are not unexpected consequences of laissez-faire that Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and others failed to anticipate--they are expected consequences of the mixed economy that they explained decades ago.

The ‘other’ side isn’t silent, and they’re wrong. So why should we be so silent when, unlike them, we have reality on our side.

Recession means correction. It means businesses need to learn how to do more with less – to correct their prices and product lines to meet new market conditions, which generally means lowering costs and making savings.

But recession doesn’t necessarily need massive unemployment.

Just as markets for goods and services will clear if prices are allowed to fall to meet diminished demand, so too can labour markets clear when labour prices are allowed to fall to meet the new more parlous economic conditions.

For the most part however labour markets don’t clear when labour prices need to drop -- and people lose their jobs instead. For the most part people lose their jobs because labour prices aren’t allowed to drop, or because it’s considered easier to sack people that it is to negotiate for lower wages and salaries: the result is a recession-driven rise in prices and a decrease in productivity.

But there is another way, one that more than a few businesses and their employees are now discovering -– as a friend just phoned excitedly to tell me.

Staff at his company have agreed unanimously to pay cuts instead of sackings –- five percent pay cuts for wage earners; ten percent pay cuts for salary earners –- with the result that their projected redundancies don’t have to happen, and the company and all who work there have now given themselves the best chance they can to have a good Christmas, and to do more with less in the New Year: in other words, to survive, and hopefully to flourish as soon as things turn around.

My friend tells me the spirit within the company has now gone from terminal to team-spirited. There’s a new feeling, she tells me, that everyone feels they’re working together and doing what they can to help keep the company going and to keep each others jobs safe.

A great news story.

No, not every company can do this. There are some that really do have to go to the wall lest the continuing malinvestment they represent keep dragging us all down –- three of this type have just poured enough alcohol down the throats of America’s politicians to save their skins at everyone else’s expense –- but honest companies with good product lines who just need to survive through the bad times so they can get through to see the good again should put some trust in their staff, and put it to them that they might consider wage cuts rather than the redundancies that would otherwise be the only alternative.

Bernard Darnton offers some helpful suggestions on how to boost viewership of Parliament TV…

Politics geeks have printed off their copies of the Parliamentary seating plan and locked their Freeview boxes to Parliament TV.

For some reason there are people who voluntarily watch this stuff – regularly. Don’t get me wrong: there is some value in watching Parliament. It’s like eating haggis. It’s something you should do once, for educational purposes, but don’t be surprised when you feel disgusted and don’t ever want to do it again.

The greatest commotion so far in this 49th Parliament’s short life has been over the 90-day probationary period for new employees. This is a stunningly good idea. The New Zealand public has just hired a bunch of new employees and it would be nice to know we could toss out the reprobates if they don’t behave.

Even better, if Parliament TV wanted to bump up the ratings a bit they could run it as a competition. Bring in Donald Trump for a series of Parliamentary Apprentice: “You’re fired!”

The Athenians knew a thing or two about democracy, having invented it, and they came up with the brilliant idea of ostracism. Each year they would rope off part of the agora in Athens, hold a tribal council, and vote someone off the island. Well, out of the city. The nominated person was exiled for ten years. Think how much sooner Winston would have gone under the rules of Survivor: Molesworth Street.

If we voted one MP a week out of Parliament we’d be down to a sensible number in just a couple of years. No more need to invent nonsense ministries to quiet the ranks. As a bonus, 99 cents per call to the 0900 number for getting rid of the buggers would probably fund all the government functions that we actually need.

Given that people will watch any old crap, Parliament TV could pack its schedule with dozens of shows like this. Rodney Hide’s formidable being-on-telly experience would set him in good stead for Dancing with the Members and he’s already got plenty of points on the board for Parliament’s Biggest Loser – a much contested title.

The choice of Lockwood Smith, a former game show host, as Speaker is inspired. No one could be better qualified. “Your starter for ten. Has the Minister received any reports showing the government in an improbably good light?” Bzzzt…

You at home could join in too. In Mitre 10 Nightmare Home contestants will attempt minor renovations while busybody neighbours appeal their choice of paint colour to the Environment Court. In the final episode, when the renovations are eventually complete, a gay building inspector will come round and criticise the contestants’ choice of lightbulbs and shower fittings.

New Zealand Idol could present some problems. No doubt our representatives would be keen for the title but, seriously, anyone who idolises MPs needs mittens and rubber wallpaper. New Zealand Idle, however, could become the smash hit of the season. The contest is wide open. Last year’s champion, Judith Tizard, isn’t returning and all-time superstar Jonathan Hunt’s seat has long gone cold despite decades of gentle warming. Let’s hope the competition for this one is stiff because, if all MPs did as little as these two, New Zealand would be a far freer and more prosperous place.

I hope this comes to pass. With more time spent preening for television and less time spent passing legislation – and don’t forget the frequent eliminations of contestants – it would be goodbye Big Brother and goodbye Supernanny state. But a warning: These programmes will contain scenes that some viewers may find offensive.

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

Wellington businessman Jim Donovan celebrates the end of the ‘Buy Kiwi-Made’ campaign with a cracking post that thoroughly explains how, to the extent such a campaign would have been successful, we would have succeeded only in making ourselves poorer.

As Frederic Bastiat so convincingly demonstrated decades ago, "it is better to buy from another what it would be more costly to make oneself." That remains true whether than someone else comes from our village, our city, our country or the other side of the planet. What we save in buying cheaper allows us either to buy or produce even more. If we spend ten dollars on a Chinese T-shirt instead of forty on the locally-made equivalent, we have thirty dollars in our pocket to buy a book, a CD, or dinner for two at Middle East Cafe. Which means that the economy (and ourselves) is richer by that book, that CD or that dinner. Everybody wins.

‘Buy Kiwi-made’ made sense only to those who never look further than their own nose when formulating or commenting on policy.

Donovan does however leave out one reason to celebrate the campaign’s demise: less time in our lounges for louche loser Oliver Driver.

That’s got to be something to celebrate, whatever your political views. Read his post.

There’s outrage around the union- and compulsion-dominated traps that the new government is about to allow employers and employees to test each other out for ninety days before the full, costly, restrictive panoply of labour law descends to intrude upon the relationship.

it will bring about bad practice in small businesses, instead of businesses being very careful when employing people and checking their references. She says people should have dignity at work and be treated fairly. Ms Kelly says unjustified dismissal and unjustified disadvantaged are being removed from the law. She says under the bill people can be sacked for attending their grandmother's funeral or being sick, which have nothing to do with incompetency.

the practical effect of the law change will be to increase the vulnerability of new employees at precisely the point when they are most vulnerable. He says denying rights of protection against unfair dismissal is dangerous in the hand of bad or inexperienced employers

is frankly an astonishing abuse of our democracy. A piece of legislation that will remove basic work rights from hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders in any one year is being rammed through Parliament without any discussion or debate.

And summing it all up Sue Bradford calls it “a disgraceful attack on both workers' rights and on democracy.”

They appear to think that it is only the intrusion of government that keeps wages and conditions up, rather than the productive profit-seeking of entrepreneurs and businessmen, and that in the absence of intrusion – even for ninety days – the conditions of workers will go to the wall.

They seem to consider that employers hire employees only to dismiss them, instead of to put them to work.

They seem unaware that as the world’s economic crisis hits home here in New Zealand job-seekers are going to need every bit of help they can to find new employment, and this is a small step towards that.

They seem to have forgotten in their “anger” over urgency that a substantively similar bill was presented and much debated just two years ago -- and in the case of The Standard they seem to have forgotten all their arguments in favour of ramming through under urgency the Electoral Finance Act and the Emissions Trading Act, two of the biggest assaults on democracy, free speech and prosperity seen in recent years, and both of which saw the bills being written as the earlier clauses were being passed.

And they seem blithely unaware that there are many people who want desperately to become a worker, but who are locked about because present employment law discourages employers from taking a risk on them – that a ninety-day trial is just what many would-be workers need in order to prove themselves.

This is not an attack on workers. It’s a leg up for those who want to work, but who are presently locked out. The facts are these:

It could only be a bad or inexperienced employee advocate who was unaware that to invest ninety days in a new employee is a considerable investment – since the new employee who hits the ground running on day one is rare – a “sunk cost” that no reasonable employer would throw away on a whim in the manner Ms Kelly and Mr Powell and Ms Bradford think they will.

It could only be an incompetent employee advocate who was unaware of the risk every employer takes when they hire every new employee, and the risk is often highest with those who need employment the most -- the young, the old, the inexperienced, the under-qualified, those who’ve been out of work or their profession for a while – and who an entrepreneurial employer might consider for their position if they have to chance to “try before they buy.”

And it could only be a politician who could call this an attack on “workers’ rights” when what it is in fact is a step, a small step, towards helping the unemployed become workers.

The fact is that every business and every entrepreneur survives by taking a risk; by seeing a new vision or a new idea, assessing it, and then backing their judgement. That’s where wealth (and jobs) comes from. But while they live by risk, present employment law does not encourage them to take risks when they choose who to hire because, as too many Employment Court decisions have shown, letting an unsuitable employee go is a about as easy as getting David Cunliffe to express humility: which means the downside of hiring someone who turns out to be unsuitable is high.

The fact is that in in the present legal environment when an employer has to choose between John who’s well-qualified but dull and Hone who is less-qualified and less-experienced but perhaps a little sharper, the employer is more likely to offer nice-but-dull John their job, and to show Hone the door. Too risky, you see. Too expensive a process if your personnel department gets it wrong. Much easier to play it safe and select the employee who just ticks all the boxes, and let the “riskier” candidate go.

You see, present law favours nice-but-dull, while it lowers the boom on those candidates who need someone to take a risk on them. Those “riskier” candidates are finding it hard to get a toe on the employment ladder, and the fact is that present employment law is helping to making that happen.

We all suffer by that – employers and manufacturers who miss out on good talent at good prices; would-be employees who keep finding the door shut in their face; and consumers, who don’t get to take enjoy the products of what this pool of untapped talent can do. In a time of rising unemployment, every barrier to productive employment that can be removed is worthwhile. Every job-hunter should welcome this move.

But there is one group who suffers disproportionately more than any other from the way restrictive employment law forces employers to ‘play it safe,’ and despite the great boon this bill would offer them they are unlikely to be listening to any of the arguments, or contacting Ms Kelly or Mr Powell or Ms Bradford to tell them to pull their heads in.

That group is the seemingly unemployable and unemployed Maori youth.

Whatever you believe about the present unemployment figures (a rate of just under 4%, with every chance of that increasing) there are nearly 300,000 people are either on a benefit or otherwise seemingly unemployable. Included in those figures are a whopping 27% of young Maori who are unemployed – young talent that is under-skilled, under-experienced, under-qualified (and in too many cases criminally-qualified). These are the very people who most need somebody to take a risk on them – who need employers to be free to take a chance on them.

But they aren't listening to this debate. They won’t be ringing Ms Kelly and Mr Powell and Ms Bradford to tell them to sit down and shit up.

There's someone who could ring them on their behalf though. Someone who could make a tangible difference. With some justice, the Maori Party could point out to them that present employment law locks out “their” people. They could call this present employment law racist -- and in this case they might actually be right. It's targeted against the very group the Maori Party claim to represent. It makes life worse for them. This one bill could do more to open doors for under-skilled and under-qualified young Maori than any hundred government programmes aimed at closing their gaps -- it would give them the chance at real employment, and the chance for many of them to turn their lives around.

Maybe the ones who should be fronting this debate with Kate Wilkinson are those two who could most easily silence the likes of Kelly, Powell and Bradford. But are Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples really aware of the issues at stake? We might find out sooner than we think.

Playwright Maurice Maeterlinck saw Monna Vanna as a heroine -- “a woman revered as the epitome of honor and virtue, who must surrender her body for a night to the hated leader of the Florentine army,” and whose choices that night “unleashed a torrent of conflicts and sub-conflicts.”

What estimation do you think Rossetti makes of Monna, and why? Look at the clues the artist offers[click here and scroll down a little for some of them].

Is Monna, as depicted here, in some way similar to Judith, who was faced with a similar choice?

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

A guest post here from my colleague Graham Clark, lead singer, guitarist and song writer for the brilliant band Brilleaux.

I just read on the front page of the Herald that Auckland’s council is passing a law that forbids BUSKERS from playing a song more than once every hour!! WTF? Does that mean you can play a 45 minute version of ‘Sister Ray,’ but Not 2 x 5 minute versions of ‘Sweet Jane’? What about encores? What about requests? Who exactly is going to police this, and at whose expense? Are they going to allocate some TWAT in grey zip-up shoes and a clipboard to stand there with each busker and write down what songs they play and then bust them if they play a song twice? How would Mr Grey-Shoes even know what’s being played. And who exactly gets to feel Mr Grey-Shoes’ hand upon their collar? Does this apply only to buskers who have applied for a council-approved busking licence, or does it apply to tourists or travelling buskers also? What if you are walking down Queen Street and accidentally whistle the same song twice - can you get busted? There is only one considered response: “FUCK OFF!!” I can’t wait till my band gets to play at the next festival in Auckland - I am going to play the same song several times and see if we can get ourselves busted. It just shows how things have changed. In the good old days musicians used to have to resort to trashing hotel room, chucking TVs out of windows, doing drugs or getting drunk and disorderly to get arrested. Now all you have to do is play the same song twice.

The two immediate additions to the government urgent programme over and above the previously announced “first 100 days action plan” are to implement Wayne Mapp’s proposal allowing new employees a ninety-day trial with their new employer before the full panoply of restrictive state-imposed employment law comes into play (a small advance for employment law, but at least some small help to employers and employees in what is about to be a very troubled employment market), and the announcement of the make-up and terms of reference for the select committee inquiry into so called “climate change” -- which has explicitly at least ruled out an inquiry into the science behind the scare stories, concentrating instead on guessing what other countries might do about the scare stories, how they might respond to what we might do, and whether a carbon tax or a trading scam is the right way for NZers to be fleeced.

You can see the make-up of the committee and the terms of reference here (hat tip NRT: head to the bottom of page 9 for the inquiry details). Time to start putting together your submissions.

The most promising moment of today's Speech from the Throne came right at the start, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo. "Just four sentences in, after noting the new government's commitment to economic growth, the Governor-General read out the following: 'In pursuing this goal of economic growth my Government will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and a belief in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives.' "This is probably the first time in living memory the principle of individual freedom has been mentioned at all, let alone as central, in a formal government agenda," notes Perigo. "Of course, too much shouldn't be expected from a government stuffed with anti-freedom conservatives and the occasional unreconstructed Muldoonist, but it's fair to assume Prime Minister John Key knows what his party is supposed to represent, and we freedom-lovers will be demanding that he deliver on his welcome inclusion of it in today's agenda-setting document.

This post arises from a question in reply to a comment I made at "Crusader Rabbit" last week on this post. It also serves to address concerns raised by CR author 'KG' on Libertarianz immigration policy:

Q: What's your solution to open immigration in light of Muslim terrorism?

The question of the ramifications of open immigration in this age of global terrorism is one that arises from otherwise libertarian-leaning folk from the blue corner in particular, (albeit not exclusively), and I understand their concerns.

Can someone please explain the Broken Window Fallacy to Obama? That when the government takes business’s money and spends it to “create” make-work jobs, then that means those businesses who’ve been stolen from have just that amount less with which to create real jobs.

It looks like another local blog has bitten the post-election dust: this time it’s NZBC, which has been putting out some good stuff in recent months. [UPDATE: Chris from NZBC reports “Rumours of NZBC's demise are greatly exaggerated. Stephen may have decided to take a break from blogging, but the rest of us are just on a kind of extended, work- and baby-imposed sabbatical. Or something.” Yet another cost of babies: baby-imposed sabbaticals.]

Olson, who has been writing his OverLawyered blog since July 1, 1999, [and you would imagine] knows a thing or two about longevity. His blog is widely considered to be the oldest legal blog and is also one of the most popular, regularly surpassing 9,000 unique daily visitors. “People who force themselves to blog, it’s a sad spectacle,” he says. “You can tell reading it that it’s painful to them.” The key is to find a topic that will sustain you. “You have to think, ‘Boy, there’s so much to write about I can’t imagine getting tired of it anytime soon,’” he says.

That’s the key. If you don’t have a selfish reason for blogging, then you ain’t gonna sustain the time and effort required. It’s not primarily about having hundreds of readers –- although that’s great if you can pull that off -- it’s about having to say something and maintaining a forum in which to say it.

Here’s an old cartoon from the now-defunct Cox and Forkum blog that accurately describes the blogger’s cycle:

“Rush Creek,” says the New York Times in this story (that gets just a few details wrong, which is not bad for The NY Times), “is the country's most enduring and successful -- and undiscovered -- middle-class community built according to Wright's principles.” Hat tip Prairie Mod, who say

The article recounts the origin of the community and how it's survived through the years, changing the lives of the people who have sought out this architectural secret. It's the sort of lifestyle and community that is founded on the same principles that are at the heart of living PrairieMod. Check out the article and also cruise this link to see some Flickr photos of some of the houses in this remarkable Wright-inspired community.

Monday, 8 December 2008

Wow! Isn’t this new National/ACT/Maori/Peter Dunne-Nothin Government hitting the ground running. John Key has flown around the world in a plane. He’s spoken to world leaders. New ministers have got their heads down and their sleeves rolled up – they’ve been diving into their portfolios to get down to business. And in its first out-of-the-blue “crisis,” new Foreign Minister Murray McCully took action to get those poor helpless travellers out of Thailand (well, you know, he would have taken action if we had an air force.)

And now, parliament starts sitting again today! Under urgency!

Shit, this a government that has things to do. Things to do urgently. They have an an action plan. They’ve promised a first-hundred days of action that started back on November 19. (Or today, depending on who you listen to.)

When you hear the words “action plan” and “first hundred days” you surely know you’re listening to spin. At least, you would if you weren’t a press gallery buffoon like John Boy Armstrong. What’s in this “27-point action plan” that requires so much urgency and comes accompanied with so much bluster?

Anything about getting government off the necks of producers when it’s never been more urgent to do so? Anything about slashing the fat from bloated government departments (hell, even slashing whole goddamn departments) so the dead weight of their unproductive carcasses can be taken off producers’ shoulders? Anything at all about ceasing to pay no-hopers to breed, which would stop in its tracks the headlines of no-hopers killing those they’ve been paid to produce?

Of course not. For the most part, they’re neither urgently necessary nor at all productive – just a politically-fuelled mixture of banal and batshit crazy that the sycophantic commentariat are lapping up like a little boy laps up his mother’s warm milk and oaties. Let’s look at this “action plan” and see whether either urgency is justified, or “action” is a fair description (my comments are in italics).

On the economy :• The introduction and passage of National's tax package into law before Christmas, with tax cuts beginning on 1 April 2009. Derisory tax cuts that will be fully wiped out by hikes in ACC levies, and without any concomitant cuts in spending: which means taxpayers will have an extra borrowing bill to suck up, and producers will have to compete in the capital markets for the same credit as this government.• Updating and publishing the economic and fiscal forecasts to gauge the true state of the government's books and determine the on-going effects of the international economic crisis. They’re going to urgently publish some more forecasts? Gee. Can’t wait.• Appointing a Minister of Infrastructure and begin implementing National's infrastructure plan. They’re going to spend $7 billion more of your money. While cutting taxes. Which means they’re going to borrow money to bid up the prices of contractors and building materials at the very time these need to contract from their inflated heights in order to assist real recovery. Only to a politician (or to an economist in thrall to politicians) can this make sense.Another spending binge, just like the last spending binge – and we get to pick up the tab. Again.• The introduction of an RMA reform bill to reduce the costs, delays, and uncertainties in the Act. Window dressing. It’s just a few revisions to exempt the government from the RMA so it can get on with its multi-billon dollar ThingBig 2.0 public works programme, and a few others to allow “companies to win the right to take private land.” Nothing to see here, nothing at all.• The introduction and passage of National's transitional relief package into law to offer extra assistance to Kiwis who are worst hit by redundancy. More spending. More welfare. No change.• Calling in public service chief executives and instruct them to undertake a line-by-line review of their department's spending. And this will save how much?

It’s pathetic isn’t it. In the face of the world’s biggest economic calamity for decades, that was National’s “urgent” economic plan to address it: basically the same menu they had a year ago with extra spending to go.More spending, more welfare, and some tax cuts that aren’t worth a damn. Nothing to see here at all. So what about the next seven points on the “action plan,” those promised to “fix” Laura N’Order:

On Law and Order, that nice Mr Key says National will: • Introduce legislation to remove the right of the worst repeat violent offenders to be released on parole. One point that’s worth a damn.• Introduce legislation to clamp down on criminal gangs and their drug trade. Populist tosh that, to the extent that it’s successful, should help to raise profits for the criminals who remain in the drug trade – and make lessening freedom of association for the rest of us all the easier whenever the government wants to.• Introduce legislation to toughen the bail laws to make it harder for criminals awaiting trial to get bail. Another point that’s worth a damn iff at the same time court waiting times are brought down so people whom the courts must still consider innocent don’t have to rot in jail while they wait for their docket to come up.• Introduce legislation to tackle increasing violent youth crime by bolstering the Youth Court with a range of new interventions and sentences. John Key's 'Plan Blue' is for the state to either coddle kids or shackle them -- or have them sent to boot camp. None of which, I submit, requires urgency or will seriously address increasing violent youth crime. But it will attract headlines, which is all this exercise is really about, eh. • Introduce legislation to require DNA testing for every person arrested for an imprisonable offence. This is abuse. It’s as simple as that. Remember that an arrest is not a conviction. An arrest used to mean you were still presumed to be innocent, remember? Not any more. As from now you will retain (for the moment) the right not to give evidence against yourself, but even before being convicted you will lose your right not to give the state bits of your body. The National Party has had the presumption of innocence doctrine in its sights for some time. Such a long-held cornerstone of liberty against state power should not be overturned so easily, or at all.• Introduce legislation to give police the power to issue on-the-spot protection orders to help them protect victims of domestic violence. Window dressing that will empower unproven accusations to have the force of law.• Introduce legislation to compensate victims by levying criminals and putting the money into a Victims’ Compensation Scheme. More window dressing. The amount proposed, just $50 per crime, will cost more to collect than it will ever amount to. The principle with victim restitution should be that criminals should never be able to gain a value from their crimes, and should to the fullest extent possible be forced to make restitution for their crimes to their victim(s). This is not even a first step towards establishing that principle.

So some good, some bad and a whole lot of window dressing. And nothing really that could justify the phrase “action plan.” So what about the third component: education. Will they fix what’s being taught to young New Zealanders that means one-in-five leaves schools functionally illiterate and innumerate (just as they were when National was last in power)? That has left some 800,000 NZ workers unable even to transfer printed information to an order form? Will they begin to wean young NZers off the cradle-to-grave welfare expectations they imbibe in Nanny’s indoctrination centres? Will they work towards taking power away from the Ministry and the teacher unions? Will they hell. We’re looking at more testing, even more paperwork, and ever more bossyboots governance of successful educators by those who are provably unsuccessful.

In education, Nation will (“under urgency”!: • Amend the Education Act 1989 so the Minister of Education can set agreed National Standards in literacy and numeracy. Like King Canute commanding the tides, National intends to command literacy and numeracy to rise without any plan to abandon the teaching methods that have so demonstrably caused the problem.• Publish requirements for primary and intermediate schools to report to parents in plain English about how their child is doing compared to the set National Standards, and compared to other children their age. More paperwork for teachers over-burdened by the stuff.• Begin work on allocating the additional $500 million capital investment in schools in preparation for our first Budget to start future-proofing our schools. More window dressing. As Phil Rennie demonstrated, the Clark Government blew an extra $3.1 billion on education, a 26% real increase, with exactly nothing at all to show for it, showing convincingly that if throwing money at the factory schools could fix the problems of the factory schools, that would have already happened. Clearly, National has learned nothing from the news.• Introduce a "voluntary bonding" scheme which offers student loan debt write-offs to graduate teachers who agree to work in hard-to-staff communities or subjects. The payoff for National’s student election bribe. Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy. • Amend the Education Act 1989 to increase the current fines for parents of truant children from $150 and $400 for first time and repeat offenders respectively, and allow the Ministry of Education to take prosecutions. Frankly, I’d be giving parents whose children don’t attend the factory schools a medal, not a fine.

So nothing there worth a damn either. How about the next “sector”? I bet you’re just champing at the bit to find out, aren’t you? What “changes” will we see here that requires so much urgency. Will we see a change to the attitude that places ideology above patient care? To the die-while-you-wait health system that perpetuates this attitude? To a cut in the number of bureaucratic parasites that infest the government’s creaking hospital “system”? Of course not.

In health, National will:• Instruct the Ministry of Health and DHBs to halt the growth in health bureaucracy. Clearly the story of King Canute is required reading for National’s ministers. “Instructing” bureaucrats to stop doing what bureaucrats without setting up a mechanism to do that is like passing laws to stop the tides flooding the land without building flood walls to do the job. Which means this is more window dressing. • Open the books on the true state of hospital waiting lists and the crisis in services. The old political ploy: Point the finger for failure at the last government so you can buy time for your own stuff-ups to take hold.• Fast-track funding for 24-hour Plunketline. Keeping their promise on populist vote-buying – hardly a matter requiring urgency. • Instruct that a full 12-month course of Herceptin be publicly available. Keeping another promise on populist vote-buying.• Begin implementing National's Tackling Waiting Lists plan. Another plan without detail that, like Tony Ryall’s command to emergency rooms, shows the effect of studying King Canute is having a resounding effect on National’s policy writers. Look to see the same sort of command-and-fudge approach to waiting lists that the Clark Government used. • Establish a "voluntary bonding scheme" offering student loan debt write-off to graduate doctors, nurses, and midwives agreeing to work in hard-to-staff communities or specialties. As above, this is the necessary payoff for National’s student election bribe. Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy – the result of abject timidity to remove the price controls that have made communities and specialities hard to staff.

John Key said at the release of this “action plan,” "Our commitment to move immediately to tackle the issues that matter demonstrates our determination to build a brighter future for all New Zealanders."

I invite you to consider how many of these 27 points genuinely tackle the issues that matter, whether there is really any need to move urgently on any of them (beyond the urgent need to look like “action men”), and what this shows about any genuine determination about “building a brighter future” for anyone but themselves and their cabinet colleagues.

The truth is that given the scale of the world's economic problems very few of those "points" could really be called "action" in the full meaning of that word, and those that appear so are either window dressing at best, or at worst they make Cullen’s tax-and-spend proclivities look conservative – at least he was up front about making you pay through the nose, instead of extracting the readies by stealth.

We are about to see two weeks of “urgency” – two weeks of much sound and fury that will signify nothing at all beyond the sound and the fury, and end in nothing much more than we had before.

Plus ca change.

UPDATE 1: The odour of capitulation in the National caucus must be all-enveloping. Annie Fox points out that following the stabbing and killing of a Christchurch taxi driver former entrepreneur Stephen Joyce has now joined the ranks of the knee-jerk Nanny populists :

"Transport Minister Steven Joyce will review the use of distress buttons, video cameras and safety screens to separate drivers and passengers." Does the government have rules on the use of buttons, cameras and screens? If they do have these rules then the only thing Joyce needs to do is get rid of them. But let's presume that they rules don't exist - why is the government wasting time and resources on this matter - surely it is the responsibility of the taxi driver what security he would like. Just like they decide if they are going to have a Navman or CD player or air freshener.

Absolutely right. As she says, it didn’t take long for Joyce to become just another politician.

This assumes that there’s something wrong with words like “fuck.” I don’t agree. I’m with George Carlin: I think it’s one of “the most interesting and versatile words in the English language today.” Sure, Eskimos might have twenty-seven fucking words to describe snow, but this one word can be used in at least twenty-seven different ways! No wonder it’s so fucking popular:

A question for you this morning: What’s the difference between soccer player David Beckham and Auckland Regional Council head honcho Mike Lee?

In truth, there’s many differences -– from athleticism to talent to the number of Oscar-winning films with their name in the title –– not to mention the length of their wives’ skirts -- but there’s one particular difference thrown up over the weekend:

David Beckham has made a fairly large fortune playing a game that millions around the world want to see, a fortune his wife has no trouble spending.

In other words: This wasn’t an entrepreneur risking his own money on a dubious promotion; it was a local-body politician spending your money so he could pretend to be an entrepreneur -– money that Mrs Beckham will have no trouble spending down Rodeo Drive.

So where does Mike Lee get the power to throw your money away like this? To answer that, you only have to go back to 2002, when then Local Government Minister Sandra Lee (no relation AFAIK) revised the Local Government Act to gift councils "a power of general competence" – and who in their right mind would use the words “competence” and “council” without the intervening words “lack thereof” – so that councillors could legally do whatever the hell they like with your money.

And they have. This game presents in microcosm the reason the rates you pay on your property are so bloody huge while the things you’re allowed to do with your own land is such a bloody small list.

In essence (as I said at the time) what Lee’s Act overturned was a crucial constitutional principle -- the principle that citizens may do whatever they wish apart from what is specifically outlawed, whereas governments and councils may only do what is specifically legislated for.

The main purpose of this constitutional principle is to keep a leash on government, both central and local. You may judge from your own rates bill what removing this leash has done.

But we now have a new Minister of Local Government, and to remove the “power of general competence [sic]” would be the easiest thing in the world for that new minister. If Rodney Hide – for it is he of whom I speak -- wants to knock off an easy and urgent target, this would be one of the easiest and most urgent. He could do worse than refer to Libertarianz’ submission to Sandra Lee’s 2001 bill to see where to cut.

It would be as easy as Mrs Beckham spending money.

UPDATE: Rodney Mayor Penny Webster is another local-body blowhard who needs a rocket up her fiscal arse. Councils must “be prudent” in tough times says the woman who’s presided over enormous rate increases in the Rodney district, “but this shouldn't entail pruning.” Well, Penny, yes it bloody should. In case you haven’t noticed, those people whom you and your ilk view as cash cows are struggling under the cloud of a coming depression. They’re struggling to pay their bills, and they fully expect you to take “a slash-and-burn approach” to your bloated, flatulent council – a council that has levied rate increases every year for six years (2007/8 rates in Rodney lifted again by up to 12% for properties and 14% for sections) on the back of RDC salary levels rising 116% in the 5 years to 2006, even as fulltime staff numbers increased from 249 to 450.

So yes, Ms Webster, prudent really does mean slash and burn. How about you give your bloody ratepayers a break -– you could start by taking those staff numbers back to what they were five years ago, and getting rid of all the expensive make-work nonsense those overpaid, unemployable clipboard wielding blowhards have been doing. And then apologise for being an apologist for bloat, and resign.